Bay Area Seamstress Crafts Middle Finger Statement

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Depicted

SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS Radio) -- A Bay Area woman with a sense of outrage and an embroidery machine is cranking out likenesses of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg meant to be worn on the middle finger.

South Bay resident Lynne Blazer told KCBS Radio reporter Holly Quan she'd been watching the political scene and growing increasingly agitated. "I"m a stay at home mom, and I"m really shy and like a lot of people, I feel totally powerless and voiceless and I found myself flipping off the TV a lot, I was really angry about what was going on"

Stan Bunger/KCBS Radio

So Blazer turned to what she knew: embroidery. She saw a hero figure in Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and decided to create a symbol of protest featuring the jurist whose fans know her by her initials, "RBG".

The result: a likeness of Ginsburg, compete with the jabot (decorative collar) for which she's known, designed to be slipped atop the middle finger while making the gesture that leaves little doubt about its intention.

Blazer's product has caught on in a hurry. “I do the sewing when the girls are at school," she said. "I have two sewing machines in my dining room. They’re really loud so I try to do it when no one's home and I run back and forth between the two changing thread colors.”

Each "middle finger puppet" takes Blazer about a half hour to create, not including the time to package and mail it. She's trying to crank out twenty puppets a day but is falling behind, with a backlog of over 150 orders. Since her project hit the internet, orders have arrived from as far away as Canada and Great Britain.

Still, she's happy. She calls the response "cathartic" and "overwhelming"

Blazer, who has pursued embroidery as a craft for the last ten years, has never seen any of her projects become this popular. She is donating proceeds from the project to Act Blue, a nonprofit dedicated to raising funds for Democratic and liberal causes and candidates.